Rolling Holes – A hole load of data

Tiberius StarGazerApr 24, 2017

Wormholes are a spooky space. The mystery mixed with the chaos is hard to keep track of, but now we have the all new tool Rolling Holes to break it down so that everyone can keep track of the action and see who are the most bloodthirsty corporations to reside there.

To get further insight, I interviewed the creator/developer to see how it all works and what you can expect to see from Rolling Holes in the near future.

First of all, why don't you tell us a little about yourself?

Hi, my name is Free Sample. I started playing EVE in 2013 with a small group of friends that migrated over from DUST 514 *shudder*. I enjoyed the level of complexity and depth that EVE provided and it brought me back to the same feeling I had when playing sandbox MMO’s when I was younger. As I got to know more about the game, I became intrigued with everything that wormholes had to offer from a gameplay perspective. I joined Lazerhawks in 2014 and flew with them for a few months before life got in the way of my EVE hobby. I recently came back to both New Eden and Lazerhawks now that time has opened up.

I spend my days outside of EVE as a Data Scientist in the energy and transportation industry. My evenings are spent being a dad to my awesome kids who I treasure like the future isk-making opportunities that they are. Once everyone under 4 feet tall is in bed I work on this project (Rolling-holes.com) or fly around w-space.

What does Rolling Holes do?

Rolling-Holes is published daily and monthly data and insights for a slice of New Eden that doesn’t inherently lend itself to transparency. In Null, a player can see who owns what SOV which translates to large directives becoming public knowledge quickly. Wormholes are secretive in nature and I wanted to bring some visibility into the fun we all have. Presently, Rolling Holes is a sort of ranking board for wormhole entities: a player can see how their small corp is growing and ranking against their peer-aspirant corporations, or a corp can see which of them took the top spot on the most w-space kills for this month. My current personal favorite stat is the metric that tracks which corp lost the most isk to NPC-Only Losses. The homepage has a smaller daily update that shows data that allows users to extrapolate what happened yesterday (like the EyEs.FR eviction attempt that happened a few days ago). I expect features will continue to be added as time goes on, especially as the community starts to want to claim top spots in really awesome or embarrassing statistics.

What led to you creating it?

There were two motivations for making Rolling-Holes. The inspiration for Rolling Holes came from someone in teamspeak bringing up the old wormhole comparison that Noobman (from HK) used to put together. Before I left EVE two years ago, I remember looking at Noobman’s comparisons in an effort to understand what everyone in W-Space was doing. That comparison was part of what led me to Lazerhawks and piqued my interest in wormholes. When I came back to EVE, I wanted to know which groups were still around and I couldn’t find the information anywhere with the exception of sifting through zkillboard.com. The second motivation to bring Rolling Holes to life was driven by professional development. I mentioned before that I do data science – I wanted to get experience with setting up infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, test out Google Analytics, and start learning some web development to add to my resume.

So naturally the two sort of blended together to what you see today. As someone who enjoys visualized data, I had to do more than just get and aggregate the data. This means there will be a lot of graphs with more coming soon. I would consider the project in its infancy so expect more visual updates as I learn more about web development.

I’m a Wormholer, how can I get my group added?

Ah the golden question… quick sidebar before answering! I initially launched the site using an outdated list (with a few personal additions from corp-mates) that contained 34 corps/alliances. Following the launch with this outdated list, there was a massive amount of interest regarding corps being added. As of this Q&A, there are now 73 on that list. This is really exciting, but will likely make some data visualization visually difficult. As a result, Rolling Holes will likely establish some form of minimum requirements in order to be included in our monthly reports and data visualizations. Don’t worry though! All Corps will be included in the monthly data which can be filtered and sorted to your heart’s content. /end-sidebar

If you’re an up and coming corp (or [I] just missed you), you can reach out to me with feedback, ideas, requests to be added by emailing [email protected], @rolling_holes on twitter or @free_sample on tweetfleet slack. Donations or messages in game can be sent to Free Sample.

What are your plans for the future?

There will be lots of new stuff coming out of Rolling Holes as time goes on. Some things we’re ready to share, others we aren’t. You may have noticed this month that we now visualize isk killed in w-space and k-space. This was probably the most requested thing we received – behind having corps added to the list – since the initial release. We are exploring a number of other really cool things like how best to track corp performance over time. We think this should unlock some fun behaviors, like corps claiming recognitions such as “most improved”. Other items in the development queue include breakdowns for ship vs structure kills, leading to eviction metrics, and network analysis that indicate which groups are flying together and which ones they are clashing with. We are also pretty close to figuring out the most active times of the day/days of the week for Corps/Alliances. So yes – we definitely have plans for the future and look forward to hearing what the community thinks.

All links and graphs shown are for 2017/03 the most recent at time of publication. Graphics shown are used under permission from Rolling-Holes, they are shown here as simple images but you can head to rolling-holes.com for the fully interactive experience.

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